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Archive for April, 2018

“Consciousness expresses itself through creation. This world we live in is the dance of the creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on. On many an occasion when I’m dancing, I’ve felt touched by something sacred. In those moments, I’ve felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists. I become the stars and the moon. I become the lover and the beloved. I become the victor and the vanquished. I become the master and the slave. I become the singer and the song. I become the knower and the known. I keep on dancing and then, it is the eternal dance of creation. The creator and the creation merge into one wholeness of joy.

I keep on dancing and dancing … and dancing, until there is only … the dance.

Dancing the DreamMichael Jackson

Beloved,

My life has changed so much in the last few months. It seems that I felt pretty balanced in August and September, but when my granddaughter moved back in with me and my husband, my sense of balance went down the toilet.

[Michael laughs.] And this surprises you? Makes you uncomfortable? I think you will find that life will challenge you in this way. Just when you think you’ve got yourself on an even keel, along comes a great big wave that tests how enlightened and balanced you really are.

Yes … a little. Actually, to be perfectly honest, it makes me very uncomfortable.

Yes, I have felt your discomfort. A lot of people react to change as if it were the “enemy.”But it’s not. It is the one constant in the universe – the one thing you can totally count on. No matter what your circumstances are, they are guaranteed to change so you should learn to embrace change rather than resisting it. These kinds of changes challenge you and help you grow and develop.

What is it about the changes that have occurred in the past few months that have made you so uncomfortable?

Well, it seems that my spare time (to be interpreted as “Michael time”) has become much more limited since the end of September. There have been so many obligations to fulfill for my granddaughter (appointments to get her to) and, as a result, you have felt very distant.

I remember all too well that period from 2002-2009, one of the darkest times of my life specifically because I had shut you out (or, at least, tried to.) I don’t ever want to repeat that mistake. And when I become so busy with other activities, it feels a little bit like that seven years.

You didn’t “shut me out.” Our relationship was just “on hold” for a little while.

Seven years is a “little while?”

[Michael laughs.] The blink of an eye in the larger scheme of things. And you must remember that time is irrelevant. It is not carved in stone like you have been conditioned to believe; it is fluid. It takes as long as it takes; it can seem like eternity when you are uncomfortable or pass in the blink of an eye according to your activity and absorption level as you have experienced yourself. There is no set time for the assimilation of new experiences.

As we’ve discussed in previous dialogs, you were dealing with situations that required your attention. I was always there. You said that you were attracted to my voice and photographs of me when you saw them on news websites and the images always brought you a moment of peace regardless of what you were dealing with.

Yes, that is true. I read a phrase in a book I’m reading, “Now they saw him eye to eye and face to face, and Krsna entered within their hearts through their eyes.” [KRSNA: The Supreme Personality of Godhead]. That sentence so describes the feeling I get from viewing photographs of you.

That moment of peace was me reminding you that WE ARE ONE and WE ARE FOREVER. However, you were distracted and didn’t really recognize that possibility until much later.

You look on that time as such an arid, desolate experience, but it was also very rich in a lot of ways and ripened the fruit of our ongoing relationship much more than anything else could have. Our union laid down its roots and grew much stronger in the wake of that seven years though, at the time, you couldn’t have known that.

It’s like when you plant a seed in nice, dark, moist soil and you water it regularly, but after a week or so all you see on the surface is nice, dark, moist soil. You could get discouraged and think that nothing is happening because you can’t see it; there is no green bud. You can’t rush these things. If you keep on watering it, eventually your plant will sprout. You can’t pull it out of the ground; that doesn’t work

Looking back on it from hindsight, could we have formed this bond – could we have experienced these conversations – without that “crisis of faith?” I don’t think so. And may I just remind you: Because of your willingness to put these dialogs out there, you are not the only beneficiary of these conversations.

You remind me so much of my essay “The Fish That Was Thirsty.” Do you remember it?

Yes, of course, I remember it. It is one of my favorite passages in your wonderful book, Dancing the Dream: Poems and Reflections.

You are just like the little fish who received a strange message from God. At first, the little fish doubted that he could have received a message from God in the first place. I mean, “Let’s face it,” the little fish asked himself, “Who am I that God should appear to me and give me a message?”

Now, please understand, I am not comparing myself to God, but the parallels still work. How long did you ask yourself the same question?

Well, if you count my first inspiration to your transition, I guess it would be about sixteen years, seven of which I was in a cold, dark place.

Exactly. You just couldn’t believe that you were worthy or capable of receiving me and the seven years that we were just discussing when you “talked yourself out of” being worthy and capable were needed before you could come to the realization that you didn’t really care if you were worthy and capable or not. It no longer mattered. You didn’t want to be without me any longer.

Actually, you were torn between two worldviews – the one that states that what can be seen, smelled, tasted, touched, and heard compose the only reality – and the one that states that the material world is only the tip of the iceberg and there is so much more to be appreciated beneath its surface with just a slight shift in perception.

Yes, but 2009 was hard! Wasn’t there any other way?

[Michael laughs.] You are still awakening. The ripples haven’t reached the shore, yet.

Please remember this: You were never without me; you just convinced yourself that you were and you created that reality for yourself. Because, as we’ve talked about before, you are living in your mind. What you refused to recognize then was that I was always there, just like I am always here now. At the time, you didn’t know that was possible. Now, you do. And not only you.

Now, let me ask you this: Would you have believed and trusted that was possible if I was still walking the Earth with you in my physical manifestation? Never-mind; that was a rhetorical question and one that we have discussed many times before.

This is a recurring pattern with you and it is perfectly understandable considering your history. Please understand that I am not criticizing. I have nothing better to do than remind you. I am here.

We’ve been togetherFor such a long time now

Just like the little fish, you had to learn to conquer your fear and to not care what all the other fish think of you … or your message. And just like the little fish, you need time to come to the realization that you are swimming in me, buoyed up in me, breathing me … that I am just another part of you and that you are a very cherished part of me.

So, the little fish goes off and tells every other fish he runs across that he is thirsty. He is either ignored or ridiculed for being so gullible or called crazy until he comes to the wise old whale with all his warts and scars. In this scenario, I am the wise old whale.

The wise one recognizes that the little fish has had a revelation. He doesn’t judge him as the other fish he encountered did; he sees in the little fish a smaller, younger version of himself and he explains to the little fish that he was once thirsty, himself. The little fish asks the wise old whale, “What does this message mean?”

The whale explains:

“It means we are looking for him [God] in all the wrong places,” and when we don’t find him, we blame him.

“How strange,” the little fish said, “to miss what is everywhere.”

You are my little fish. You are missing what is everywhere. You experience something that changes your circumstances and throws you off balance for a while. Your comfort zone is breached and, as we’ve discussed previously, your comfort zone is comfortable and safe, but it restricts your growth. The change in circumstances sends you into a nose dive during which you search high and low for me because you don’t feel me as strongly as you did before the change occurred. Your focus has changed and you are required to put the majority of your attention elsewhere. Your search becomes more and more frantic until you get yourself all tied in knots thinking that I have abandoned you when it is really more that you have shifted your focus to deal with your changed circumstances. You need to learn to cut yourself a little slack and allow yourself some time to adjust to the changes that you will inevitably encounter.

Eventually, however, you allow me to remind you that I have promised that I am always here at the speed of thought.

Like the little fish, you are swimming in me; your gills are breathing oxygen through me because we are one. When you are drawing me, we are one. When you are practicing playing your keyboard, we are one. When you are writing, we are one. When you visit Neverland in your imagination, we are one. When your attention is drawn away to care for your family, we are one. When your granddaughter and you are driving to one of her appointments, we are one. When you find me on a t-shirt in a store, we are one. When the clock shows 11:11 or your odometer shows 111.1, we are one because you think of me. That’s all it takes.

There is no activity you can engage in that I am not a part of because there is no separation between us. Time cannot separate us; space cannot separate us.

You are reading a book right now that talks about consciousness and the thought process in relation to time and space, aren’t you?

Yes I am.

Will you tell me a little bit about it?

Sure. The book is called Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe by Dr. Robert Lanza, MD and Bob Berman and I haven’t totally finished reading it, yet. I can summarize a little of what I’ve read though.

The authors propose that the reality that we are all familiar with depends on our consciousness to exist. In other words, it has no intrinsic existence or reality in the absence of a conscious observer.

For example, they posit a definitive answer to the often repeated question: If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one present to hear it, does it make a sound? Their answer is: NO! The authors explain their answer as follows:

“Limbs, branches, and trunks violently striking the ground create rapid pulses of air. […] This according to simple science is what occurs even when a brain-ear mechanism is absent – a series of greater and lesser air pressure passages.

“Now, let’s lend an ear to the scene. If someone is nearby, the air puffs physically cause the ear’s tympanic membrane (eardrum) to vibrate, which then stimulates nerves only if the air is pulsing between 20 and 20,000 times a second … Air that puffs 15 times a second is not intrinsically different from air that pulses 30 times, yet the former will never result in a human perception of sound because of the design of our neural architecture. In any case, nerves stimulated by the moving eardrum send electrical signals to a section of the brain, resulting in the cognition of a noise.”

The authors posit that the universe is predisposed to produce life … and not just life, but consciousness … and that any science that attempts to explain the origins and/or nature of the universe without taking into account the awareness or consciousness of the observer is doomed to failure.

Yes, as I have mentioned before, this is all a massive movement toward greater and greater consciousness.

This failure to consider the observer as an important component of any scientific theory, they contend, is largely responsible for the anomalies currently being discovered by quantum theories – what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

They base their hypothesis on recent research into quantum mechanics, which we have talked about before, specifically the experiments that infer that particles wink in and out of reality according to the presence or absence of an observer as well as those that show that particles once joined exhibit complimentary responses instantaneously when one is stimulated even at great distances from each other. They state that particles only become particles (matter) if they are observed and that until then, they are only probabilities and they exist as waves.

In addition, they aver that space and time have no intrinsic reality without an observer, that distance and time are merely constructs of the human mind which do little more than help us organize objects and events in a way that makes sense to us and are, therefore, variable according to our perceptions and observations.

Of course, the book is full of scientific explanations similar to the perception of sound previously cited, but I am only summarizing the authors’ findings in this dialog.

The authors state that we have been programmed and conditioned to think of ourselves and our reality as separate things with no interaction possible between the two and that the recent findings of quantum physics disprove that view of reality. All of us have been brainwashed from infancy to perceive the reality we encounter as solid matter, unchangeable, and “out there” while we reside “in here.” Their theory of “Biocentrism” places the human observer at the very center of the nature of reality as the observer joined to it through our observation.

Stargazer

As you stated in another of my favorite passages from Dancing the Dream: Poems and Reflections … That One In The Mirror:

“…What if that one in the mirror isn’t me? He feels separate. He sees problems “out there” to be solved. Maybe they will be; maybe they won’t. He’ll get along. But I don’t feel that way – those problems aren’t “out there,” not really. I feel them inside me. A child crying in Ethiopia, a sea gull struggling pathetically in an oil spill, a mountain gorilla being mercilessly hunted, a teenage soldier trembling with terror when he hears the planes fly over: Aren’t these happening in me when I see and hear about them?

[You know, Beloved, I am thankful every day for what I call the “breadcrumbs” you left us to discover. There is always something new to uncover, a deeper or fuller understanding of your life and the way you lived it. Of course, I have read and re-read Dancing the Dream a hundred times since 1992, but it is ever-fresh, always enlightening. I feel like Hansel and Gretel in the old nursery rhyme, following the breadcrumbs through a dark and lonely forest to arrive safely at home.

When I first read That One In The Mirror, I thought it was a beautiful essay … and I still do. Later, I saw it as a remarkable insight into the concept of empathy. Now, as I delve more deeply into the books I am reading, I find that science is discovering an underlying truth to your words and proving them with scientific observations.]

God bless you! As I’ve mentioned before, you are living in a very exciting time … a time when “rememberings” will be brought into focus and proven by scientific methods … a time when the huge chasm separating the material worldview and the spiritual worldview will be bridged and eradicated.

Carrying this hypothesis to its logical conclusion, they state that the observer is a fundamental necessity to any scientific study of the nature of the universe and that Newtonian and Darwinian (Western) science excludes the observer from all of their equations and, therefore, cannot be viewed as the absolute end product which can explain the origin or nature of the universe or of the human condition. Interestingly enough, Eastern cultures do not experience this disconnect between science and spirituality, but rather view them as two sides of the same coin.

In Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death, Lanza and Berman address an issue that we talked about in Installment 100. We were discussing my regret that I was not able to consciously help you during a time when you were experiencing a “crisis of faith.” You said:

Don’t regret what wasn’t done then; don’t cry and moan about missed opportunities; do it now.

As we’ve spoken about before, there is no time where WE are ONE; everything is happening NOW. […] You can return to a time when you wanted to make a contribution but failed to do so for whatever reason. You can heal that gap at least in your own mind and when it is healed there it is healed everywhere because WE ARE ONE.

Yes, I remember.

Well, apparently, scientific experimentation has proven your statement. For this explanation, I am not going to paraphrase, but will quote the authors directly:

“Now we’ll try something even more radical – an experiment first performed in 2002. First, we’ll put detector A on a track so we can reduce the distance the A photons travel before they’re detected, thus taking them less time to get there. This way, photons taking the B route will hit their own detectors after the A photons have finished their journeys. (The coincidence counter is turned on, so data is flowing.)

But oddly enough, the results do not change. When we insert the which-way lenses into path A, the interference pattern is gone, even though the coincidence-measuring ability that lets us determine which-way info for the A photons will not occur until later. But how can this be? Photons taking the A path already completed their journeys. They either went through one or the other slit or both. They either collapsed their wave function and became a particle or they didn’t. The game’s over; the action’s finished. They’ve each already hit the final barrier and were detected – before twin B finished its own journey and thus triggered the coincidence counter into delivering useful information.

The photons somehow know whether or not we will gain the which-way information in the future. Somehow, photon A knows whether the which-way data will eventually be present, when it can safely ride through both slits while remaining in its fuzzy both-slits ghost reality, or when it can’t – because it apparently knows whether photon B, far off in the distance, will or will not eventually hit its detector and activate the coincidence counter that will ultimately deliver a useful signal to us.”

Now, I don’t pretend to be any kind of scientist, but I think I can understand English. Did these eminent scientists (one of whom is a pioneer in stem cell research and regenerative medicine) just say that the photons (one of the basic components of light and therefore reality) know (or care) whether or not we will gain the which-way information in the future? And if it works in the future, doesn’t it also hold true for the past?

Yes, as I said, an exciting time to be alive. The fields of quantum physics and quantum mechanics will be two scientific realms to be watched closely in the months and years ahead.

And, yes, that’s what they said. We are forever and forever doesn’t just mean from this point forward; it also extends into the distant past.

Well, color me dumbfounded.

[Michael laughs.]

And speaking of the distant past, the authors also coin a phrase to describe consciousness and our experience of time. Retrocausality is a term they use to describe the findings of John Wheeler, who said, “Nature at the quantum level is not a machine that goes its inexorable way,” as Newtonian and Darwinian science states unequivocally. In examining the behavior of photons traveling through space from the explosion of a quasar, Wheeler concluded,

“’The event, billions of years ago, didn’t really happen until we observe it today.’ Only now will a particular photon pass above or below the foreground galaxy billions of years ago.”

Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute!! At first reading that sentence just plain doesn’t make sense; it’s at the very least an error in syntax. Would you please repeat that sentence?

[Michael laughs.] Yes, please repeat that sentence.

“Only now will a particular photon pass above or below the foreground galaxy billions of years ago. In other words, the past isn’t something that has already irrevocably occurred. Rather, long-ago events depend on the present observer. Until they’re observed at this moment, the events didn’t really unfold, but lurked in a blurry probabilistic state, all ready to become an actual ‘past’ occurrence only upon our current observation. This astonishing possibility is called retrocausality.”

Lanza and Berman quote two of our greatest scientific minds, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow: “There is no way to remove the observer – us – from our perceptions of the world … In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.”

Regarding death, the authors state:

“In short the very idea of death, or becoming nothing, is empty of meaning. Becoming nothing may seem like a tangible concept, but it is actually as meaningless as the word “it” in the phrase “it’s a nice day.” It appears linguistically, but not in the actual physical universe. The information that constitutes our selves or conscious awareness exists outside our linear spatio-temporal thinking.

“Because time doesn’t exist, there is no “after death” except the death of your physical body in someone else’s now. Everything is just nows. And because there’s no absolute self-existing space-time matrix for your energy to dissipate, it’s simply impossible to “go” anywhere. You will always be alive.”

And

“In a nutshell death is illusory. So far as actual direct experience is concerned, you will continue to find what you’ve always observed: Consciousness and awareness never began, and will never end.”

[…]

“We’re like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who went on a long journey in search of the Wizard, only to return home … and find that the answer was inside her all along.”

Kinda reminds you of The Fish That Was Thirsty, doesn’t it?

Needless to say, I find both of these books fascinating and will, no doubt, have to re-read them for full comprehension. However, I am struck with the thought that they confirm a lot of what you and I have talked about in these conversations.

Yes, they do. The concept of death is long past it’s “sell by date,” an antiquated notion that we are in the process of dispelling. And we have spoken about the illusions of time and space and their dependence upon the perceptions of the observer. It will take a while for some of these ideas to make it into high school science textbooks, but the first steps have been taken. An exciting time to be alive.